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Monday, July 30, 2012

Just Ride

Easy Riders

‘Just Ride,’ by Grant Petersen

ByDAVE
EGGERS

Published: July 27, 2012 New York Times Book Review

Many a weekend bicycle rider has had the same
unsettling experience: You ask a friend to ride with you along some scenic,
low-impact route. You show up wearing shorts, Sambas and a T-shirt, and he
shows up dressed for an Olympic time trial. On his torso is a very tight shirt
slashed with a half-dozen garish colors and logos irrelevant to him. His
helmet, decorated with flames or stripes or both, is equipped with a rearview
mirror. A rubber straw dangles around his neck like a fur stole, through which
he can drink fluids from a container on his back. And then there are the
spandex leg-­enclosures. These have patches of yellow on either flank, giving
the impression that your friend is wearing chaps. Yellow-and-black spandex
chaps.

If you can identify
with the more casually dressed biker described above, or if you want to go
biking but have been scared away by the sport’s cult of gear and equipment,
then your bible has been written. Grant Petersen’s “Just Ride” is a wonderfully
sane, down to earth and frequently funny guide to riding, maintaining, fixing
and enjoying your bicycle. That so much common sense will be considered
revelatory, even revolutionary, is a testament to how loony the bike world has
become.

Grant Petersen-Author and Bicycle Friend

Petersen opens with
this salvo: “My main goal with this book is to point out what I see as bike
racing’s bad influence on bicycles, equipment and attitudes, and then undo it.”
And he goes on to prove, conclusively, that most of what ails the world of
cycling comes from nonprofessional riders pretending, or being bullied into
pretending, that they’re professionals. The solution, he says, is to emulate
kids and other “Unracers” — people who bike for fun and not profit.

The accepted
orthodoxies are upended, one after another. Petersen is skeptical of special
biking shoes. He is pro-kickstand, pro-mud-flap. He thinks a wide, comfortable
saddle is O.K. He doesn’t see why anyone needs more than eight gears. He thinks
fragile carbon-fiber bikes and ­super-narrow tires are impractical for just
about everyone (“Getting paid to ride them is the only good reason I can think
of to ride that kind of bike”). He has nuanced thoughts on helmets (he wears
his at night but not during the day) and reminds us that biking is “lousy
all-around exercise” and shouldn’t be considered a stand-alone regimen. But
most satisfying is his takedown of the tight-shirt, ­spandex-shorts phenomenon.
“In its need for special clothing,” he writes, “bicycle riding is less like
scuba diving and more like a pickup basketball game.” A regular cotton T-shirt
and a pair of shorts will ventilate better, he says, and if you’re not trying
to shave seconds off a world record, the microscopic aerodynamic advantages of
tight synthetic clothing just don’t apply to you.

Coming from just
anyone, this kind of thinking wouldn’t carry much weight. But Petersen raced
for six years, then worked at Bridgestone,
Japan’s largest
bike maker, as a designer and marketer. When the company closed its American
office, he opened his own shop, Rivendell Bicycle Works, in Walnut Creek, Calif.
It would seem, then, that Petersen, as the ultimate insider, would be the first
guy to push expensive racing gear on every would-be enthusiast to walk into his
shop.

But with this book,
he’s trying to bring biking back to a state of moderation and rationality. If
you like the gear, he’s fine with that, and if you don’t agree with all his
advice, no problem. But he makes the case that at its core, biking should be a
simple, democratic, sometimes ludicrously enjoyable means of getting around.
“No matter how much your bike costs,” he says, “unless you use it to make a
living, it is a toy, and it should be fun.” Amen.

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